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Audio Analysis Brings New Revelations From Kent State Shooting
a_nonamiss writes "The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting today on new forensic analysis by audio scientists Stuart Allen and Tom Owen on a recently discovered audio tape from the Kent State shootings. The analysis suggests that four shots from a .38-caliber pistol were fired 70 seconds before the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of student protesters, killing four and wounding nine others. The alleged shooter, student Terry Norman, was hired by the FBI to take photos of the protesters. It has been known for some time that he had a .38-caliber pistol on his person the day of the shootings, but he has always claimed that the gun was not fired during the protest, a claim that was backed up in sworn testimony from authorities at the time."
hmm FBI employee shoots his weapon to get something started and then plausibly denys it. nothing to see here.
on that note. never take a flower to a gun fight. when an armed person(legal authority or otherwise) tells you to stop, leave, get out of his face, and you don't have a weapon. you leave, period. you don't just stay there thinking they are not going to shoot you because you are "peaceful". they don't know that and they probably don't care.
Definitely a fair point. However, if someone starts waving a gun around and firing shots, that's a good way to whip up a crowd of angry people into a fury, where the guardsmen might have legitimately felt threatened. 70 seconds is probably too long for him to have been directly responsible, but just about the right amount of time to have been a crucial catalyst.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I am far more bothered by the fact that a) Mr. Norman was on the payroll of the FBI at the time and b) authorities (may have) lied under oath about the fact that Mr. Norman discharged his weapon during the protest. This implies that the FBI was at least indirectly involved in the massacre and directly involved in the cover-up.
I'll give you that Mr. Norman probably didn't directly trigger the massacre, although shooting a gun in a crowd of angry people probably didn't contribute to happy peaceful feelings at the protest. However, the government at the time seems to have actively and knowingly participated in a cover-up. This bothers me a lot. It should bother everyone. A lot.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Ja, maybe you are right. Not to be surly, but we outside of the US sort of take for granted that all US cops are gung-ho people who "do whatever it takes", and cook up their own solutions and conspiracies to solve everything.
Emotions! In your brain!
It's suspected that the Guard believed Norman's shots to be sniper fire. It could've put them on edge, ready to overreact to something else.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
But feeling threatened is no excuse to start picking off uninvolved, unarmed people hundreds of feet away at random. "Someone in the crowd may have a gun, so shoot them all to be safe"
Should have shot all of the traitors.
Except where would Obama get his advisors?
if you think shooting "traitors", such as those college kids, is acceptable, then shouldn't you be shot now for your opposition to Obama?
nice logic!
lets see how your live gun shot recognition works when you are surrounded by an angry crowd throwing rocks at you, that you were sent to control.
i suppose in your scenario it would have all gone like this... .38 special, nothing to worry about at all, it only stings a little.
guard: hey we have just been shot at, someones trying to snipe us
guard 2: no moron that is only a
Looks like the FBI fired first.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
kill yourself, fascist
It's funny how this is marked troll but what he's responding to isn't. Society is doomed. (Yes, I just determined that by the mod behavior on Slashdot.)
Spend any time with the justice system and you will see this for yourself.
It's not just Hollywood nonsense. Cops actually act like this. It's probably not limited to American cops either.
Cops won't even make their lies terribly believable. They benefit greatly from the respect they get from most people.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
At some point, the soldiers selected targets and fired on them. No matter what the "tension" or "provocation," those men placed their cross-hairs on people who were obviously not a threat and executed them.
I would love to hear, in the soldiers' own words, how they picked their targets.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Based on what, besides your paranoid conspiracy theories?
No, a weighting of *all* of the evidence.
The photographer wasn't an FBI agent, he essentially took a free lance job from them.
But he *was* employed by them.
And this tape doesn't necessarily prove that HE was the shooter, just that someone fired 38 caliber bullets before the National Guard opened fire.
Only if you look at it in isolation.
1. Before the Guard opens fire, a man chases Norman towards the Guard, screaming that he had just shot someone. .38 to a Guardsman, who inspects it. .38 *had* been fired four times.
2. Norman gives his
3. The Guardsman exclaims that the gun had been fired four times (overheard by two neutral witnesses.)
4. The Guardsman and Norman then swear that the gun had not been fired.
5. Analysis shows that a
Now it's a pretty simple exercise to show that the Guardsman and Norman were lying. Unless you're just gonna stick your head in the sand and cry "lalalalalal I can't hear you!"
my guess is that the shooter was hired by the fbi's cointelpro unit and purposely fired the shots in order to get the desired response of overzealous national guardsmen.
...
You assume accuracy when the situation didn't require it. Simply firing could have been sufficient, and firing into a crowd requires no accuracy at all.
Learn to love Alaska
Well, I know anecdotal evidence means practically everything and Slate's research department is so thorough and concise that it's useless to argue against it, even after the writers expand on it and take things into their own context to prove a point that supports your view of Israel and Palestinian rock throwers.
Anyways, I was hit in the head with a rock once when I was 14. It was at camp and someone was throwing rocks over the side of a hill totally clueless that someone else may have been down hill. Well, as it turns out, the first rock he threw struck me in the back of the head slightly down from the top from a distance of about 75 feet and probably 45 foot in elevation. It took 16 stitches to to close up the wound/laceration, I was knocked off my feet and ended up falling another 10 or 15 feet downhill before another person grabbed me, and I suffered a Class II Hemorrhage which required a short stay in the hospital. We were taking a shortcut back from then horse stables and in an area that was posted as off limits because of how steep and dangerous it was.
If someone was attempting to do that on purpose, I would feel justified in attempting to shoot them as if I wasn't with people i was with and at a place where I could get reasonable medical attention in a short period of time, I could have bleed out and died on the spot. In my case, after about the third rock came over, everyone started yelling and then the kids throwing them paused and looked over the edge of the hill to see what was going on. They then ran and got the camp counselors who notified the camp nurse who was also a trauma rated paramedic. I also don't care about your personal instance of not getting injured when hit with a rock in the past as it says nothing about the seriousness of getting hit with a rock, just the seriousness of when you got hit with a rock.
At least half of the deceased had nothing to do with the protest, and were simply walking between classes as they were gunned down. Go ahead and defend that.
Protestors are always a threat to those in power, whom the soldiers serve. In the end, the US - or any other country - is no different from China. Fear keeps the people in line. Fear of being killed next.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
if i was the guarding over a field full of puppies and kittens, and i believed that one of them had fired a weapon at me. it would take me all of 5 seconds to return fire. 70 seconds is an eternity.
And what if alien spacecraft has anal probed everyone who insisted on coming up with lame excuses and even lamer hypothetical situations for the shameful behavior of the thugs you are trying to make excuses for? then you would really be screwed, and you little manhood enhancement would be of no help at all.
One of the problems with all or nothing attitudes like yours is that you don't seem to want to look beyond the apparent immediate.
What I mean is, suppose your right and a single rock being thrown can't seriously harm someone in full riot gear. I bow hunt and have found myself chasing a wounded deer through the woods in order to put it down because it didn't bleed out our I somehow missed my mark and didn't place a critical shot. Now how this connects is that the wounded deer is not capable of running (it's main defense) like it normally would which gives me an advantage in seeking it out and performing the final blow. So you take a wounded police officer or whatever and now nonthreatening things become seriously threatening things.
But moreover, when you allow a group of people to throw things, you don't know that it's just rocks and not plague infested puss bags or makeshift bombs, grenades, or whatever else that could be more serious even in your eyes, until after the fact which is not any way to protect your law enforcement or yourself.
Now I'm not here to defend the national guard in their shooting or the Israeli defense forces, I'm here to say that throwing rocks is more serious then you portrayed and whether you want to believe it or not, you can kill someone by doing it. I can see from a tactical perspective where allowing rocks to be thrown can deteriorate into a dead soldier or LEO pretty quick when something seriously more dangerous enters the arena.
You also have to remember that when Kent State happened, it was still legal to shoot a suspect that was only fleeing. It wasn't until the mid 1970's that the supreme court changed that causing the situations we know today. So when looking at the instance, you have to sort of view it from the perspective of the time or you won't get an accurate view of it.